The bronze bell above the glass door jangled and tolled. The door remained unmoved.
The rose girl watched the bell jounce about. "Someone's coming."
Tomoe did not look up from the fat Sudoku puzzle book. "Mm." Her pencil skittered and scratched across the open page.
The rose girl sighed and hopped off the countertop. As she padded barefoot up to the front door, a copper-colored, one piece dress sprouted out from her waist to clothe her translucent, cut-crystal flesh. The bell jerked around like a jumping bean. She smoothed out the oblong lump between her legs, swung the door wide, and stood in the threshold. She surveyed the empty parking lot. "They're a long way off. An hour, maybe?" The bell continued to clatter above her head. "This damn thing won't shut up."
"Yeah, yeah." Tomoe flipped the page. She harrumphed at the next grid of math puzzles, chewed on the pencil, then shrugged and started to fill in the empty boxes. "Piece of cake."
"So?" The rose girl turned about face. "Who is it?"
"Whoever it is," Tomoe said, "they're going to have to wait."
"Why?"
Tomoe wagged her hand over the puzzle book. "I'm not finished yet." She made a fist and bonked herself lightly on the head. "Duh!"
The rose girl stepped back into the store. The bell rang louder for a moment as the door closed. She tiptoed over to the counter, the bell chattering in the background. "Why do you still keep secrets from me, lovey?" she asked, sifting Tomoe's shining black hair through fingers of polished rose quartz.
Still writing with one hand, Tomoe reached up with the other and pulled the rose girl's palm against her cheek. "SB, do you want to be my partner, my darling, my cheeseburger?" Their eyes met. "Or my familiar, my slave?"
"I felt like a slave last night, cleaning and dragging around those stupid dumpsters."
Tomoe gave the rose girl's hand a friendly but firm squeeze. "Seriously, now: slave or cheeseburger?"
The rose girl's smile was full of diamonds. "I want to be your cheeseburger, T, whatever that means. Unless I can be your slave and still get on top, that'd be kind of hot."
Tomoe returned to her book. "Then let me have my secrets. That way you can get miffed at me, like you are now." She tilted forward, gathered a handful of the silk of the coppery dress, and squeezed it around the lump in the rose girl's crotch in long, unhurried strokes. "And I can make it up to you."
"Take the next exit," Dee said, collecting shards of glass from the window frame into a plastic pouch he had found in the Jeep's glove compartment.
Yves surveyed the empty stretches of overgrown lots on either side of the elevated highway. "We're in the middle of fucking nowhere."
"This is it," Dee insisted, "I'm certain."
"That's not what I'm worried about," Yves said. The Jeep careened through the tight curve of the exit ramp.
Ursula sat on her knees, ass-backward on the backseat, keeping watch out the rear window. "I haven't seen anything for at least twenty minutes now."
"Of course," Eurydice added, contemplating Ursula's jean-wrapped rear-end, "we don't know what we're looking for."
"Right at the end of the ramp," Dee told Yves. "Go under the overpass. Maybe we lost it."
The Jeep emerged from beneath the overpass, roaring down the grayed pavement of the back road. In the side mirror, Yves watched the shadow beneath the arch of the overpass seem to peel away from the cement and swoop into the air. "Unless," he sighed, stomping on the accelerator pedal, "it's smart enough to ambush us when we do something cosmically stupid like getting off the highway in the middle of fucking—"
The rear window flashed black. Ursula shrieked and ducked but the fluttering darkness swooped up and out of sight. The wind whistled through the broken passenger-side window. Ursula spun around, frantic, latching her seatbelt in place. Yves, Dee, and Eurydice looked at one another.
The obsidian girl touched down onto the hood. She made no sound.
She crouched before the windshield, arms splayed, the manifold curvature of her wings flared out wide on either side, blocking any view of the road ahead. She shone in the cloudless, morning sunlight, a living architecture of blackest volcanic glass. Dee and Yves' awestruck expressions were reflected back at them in the featureless, glossy tar oval of her face.
Yves recovered, found his center, and hammered down on the brake. The obsidian girl bled off the sudden, excess momentum into her wings, letting them unfold behind her in topologies that confused the eye. The Jeep's tires squealed and burned in the sudden deceleration but the obsidian girl perched unfazed on the hood. She waggled her pointer finger from side to side in a metronomic rhythm.
The speedometer's needle dropped below the fifty miles per hour mark and Dee popped open the passenger door. "Get them out of here," he said, and rolled out of the car. Eurydice screamed his name. The speedometer needle hit the thirty MPH mark.
Dee hit the pavement elbow-first. The asphalt cracked and burst and bounced him a foot back up into the air. The obsidian girl punched her knuckles against the hood and swung after him, wings rippling behind her in billows of ebony ink.
Eurydice snarled, "He's mine, you fucking gimp," and sprung out the still-open door, a bounding wildcat. The speedometer needle fell under ten miles per hour.
Ursula rebounded off her seatbelt. A swinging braid knocked her glasses clean off her face. "Um. What the Hell just happened?"
The passenger-side door fell off.
"I'm getting you out of here," Yves said. The rear tire kicked against the fallen door as the Jeep pulled away.
"No, you're not." Ursula fumbled her glasses back onto her face. "But, uh, we're getting out of this car. Right now."
Yves glanced into the rearview mirror. Ursula nodded her head toward the rear side window. A little gush of viscid, lavender fluid ran down from the roof like spilt shampoo. "Yeah, I guess we'd better." Yves pulled the Jeep over to the curb, wincing at how false his nonchalance sounded to his own ears.
A fount of creamy champagne poured over the lip of the Jeep's canvas top through the gaping hole left by the lost door. A confusion of golden hues—marigold, saffron, school-bus yellow—filled the passenger-side front seat. The air inside the car grew heady with the dizzying bouquet of caramel and melted creamsicle. The storm of melted sherbet made little sound, just a satiny susurrus, as more and more of the lush stuff piled into the bucket seat, drew itself up, and filled itself out and then further out.
"You can't leave yet, honey" purred the plump amber woman, "I haven't even started to sing."
Eurydice bounded onto the pavement with arms outstretched and her back arched high. She brought her legs down with her knees bent the wrong way. Only wrong if you plan on being a biped, she thought, running with a sinewy, feline gate. Ahead of her, Dee skimmed the road as he tumbled, the asphalt rumpling beneath him like the surface of a lake under a skipping stone. Solid boy's giving the road a case of road-rash.
Despite Eurydice's cheeta speed, the obsidian girl's powerhouse wings won the race. For a few seconds Dee and the obsidian girl danced in a horizontal, martial ballet, Dee feinting even as he fell. The obsidian girl played the game just as well, counterfeinting with a scissor kick here, dancing psuedopodia there, and Dee disappeared down a funnel of enfolding wings. A host of clashing emotions welled up in Eurydice's jumbled mind-web: panic, fear, fear for Dee, fury--jealousy. This is jealousy, she realized, watching the obisidian girl coccoon Dee until the two of them rolled over the road like a giant, licorice jelly bean. Why am I jealous? She's trying to kill him! The black ovoid rocked as it slowed. Isn't she?
Eurydice slid to halt on all fours as the ovoid cracked open. Layers of liquid black wing peeled away and Dee struggled to his feet. He bucked and flexed, trying every goojitsu trick Eurydice knew, and then a few she did not know, to shake his opponent loose. The obsidian girl clung to him, head buried in his chest, her arms hooked under his in a desperate but chaste hug.
Dee flushed and floundered in the obsidian girl's embrace. "Gerroff me!"
A wicked, single-edge blade appeared in Yves' hand in the time it took Ursula to blink. She had learned enough about her upstairs neighbor these past few hours to know he had his own brand of macho bullshit—Yves will never back down when he's afraid—and now she watched it kick into gear as he raised the weapon high. In her peripheral vision, a second trickle of translucent purplish goo ("Ghostbuster slime," she decided) seeped down the side window.
The amber woman raised her pudgy, open hands close to her head at a "raise-the-roof!" angle. She had a stout neck and a roll of double chin that wobbled as she chuckled, "Whoa, cowboy." Ursula could not place the drawn-out twang in the amber woman's accent. Boston? Virginia? New York? "Does this look like a combat chassis to you?"
The amber woman primped a dollop of golden pudding licked down over her head like a flapper haircut from the Roaring Twenties. Her hip spilled over the bucket seat and smothered the emergency break and gear shift. "Besides," she said, "you'd get a lot further with an ice-cream scoop than that knife." The surface of her substance was mellow yellow and satiny, like whipped frosting, with no elastic tension to hold her together. She churned perpetually, inside and out, in a constant, slow boil of luscious mush. "I'm not a stick of butter, I'm buttercream."
Yves lowered the blade but kept it ready at his side. "I don’t think I can take much more of this kind of thing."
A purple glaze shellacked the window to Ursula's side. "We've got another guest on the roof, Yves," Ursula said.
A muffled but acid voice razzed down from above the Jeep's canvas top. "Put a cork in your cakehole, you cunt, or you'll ruin my entrance."
"You've done that all by yourself, honey," the amber woman sighed. "The things that come out of your mouth are positively criminal."
"Got that right, fatso," said the voice. The purple sheet of glop distended over the window slurped back up. "Things should be coming in my mouth."
The amber woman treated Ursula to a conspiratorial wink of a canary diamond eye. "I spoon feed her straight lines out of charity." Her face was wide but regal and carved from lemon meringue. "Poor girl wouldn't notice a double entendre if it came with cherry on top."
An elfin, lavender face popped into view, upside down, in Yves' window. "I don't get it." Her hair tumbled around her head, an unruly mass of pale orchid petals. She shouted at Yves through the glass. "Hi! Wanna fuck?"
Yves reddened and spluttered. Before he could recover, the amber girl came to his rescue. "No, honey," she said, sizing Yves up like a piece of meat. "This tall drink of water is a man's man."
"Well, fuck me gently with a chain saw," the lavender girl said. "No wonder that Black Cherry twat is out of her gourd. 'Master' is gay." She spat the word "master" as if it were the crudest, most vile thing she could ever think to say.
"I'm not Dee," Yves said.
The lavender girl crooked her upside down head to eye the back seat, captivating Ursula with her inhuman, ethereal beauty until she opened her mouth. "Who's the dinky-dyke?"
"I came with the car," Ursula grouched.
"Hey, me too," the lavender girl said, slopping down onto the pavement in a spray of indigo. "But only when your nancy chauffeur drove above sixty." She stood, tall and haughty and nude, the lips of her pouty sex peeking out from a frill of orchid petals in her cleft just as the tapered tips of her ears poked from her dryad's mane.
Ursula thought the lavender girl looked the part of the honey nymph more than Eurydice or even Galatea. I could fall in love with something like that, Ursula realized, tracing the lines of the lavender girl's classical figure, if she'd only stay quiet. The lavender girl looked around and did a quick double take. No, no.Her mouth gaped open. Not yet. Her vulgar purple nipples hardened into cherry-pits. Hush, now, and let me drink you in. Dew dampened and slicked the insides of her thighs. Let me memorize….
"Oh, sweet merciful mother of fuck," the lavender girl marveled as Dee approached. "I'm creaming in my jeans."
Damn.
The amber woman shifted in the front seat as Dee drew near. "Oh my, now that is emotion in motion."
Ursula strained to see. Dee steamrolled toward the Jeep, falling into his unstoppable, predatory march. Ursula felt a flutter deep within her. It was a visceral but not a truly sexual thrill, like riding the crest of a rollercoaster. She remembered feeling it once before, when Dee emerged with Eurydice in his arms, and small spark of it even earlier, when he had set up her computer.
"Can you get her to let go of me?" Dee asked the lavender girl. "I'm fine, really."
The obsidian girl, her geodesic wings compactly folded against her shoulders, stood on Dee's feet with her hands latched onto his back. I used to dance with my father just like that, Ursula remembered, and the recollection somehow shocked her.
The amber woman slipped sideways out of the car, legs oozing down and taking shape as she rolled. She moved by relaxing and letting her bulk fill the space of her destination. Like an amoeba, she simply grew in the direction she wanted to go, lending her an alien but mesmerizing, smooth grace. "Ask her yourself, honey," the amber woman told Dee. "Or better yet, say you're sorry. You were the one who took one look at her and jumped from a moving car."
"He thought he was protecting his friends from her," Eurydice said, padding on all fours around Dee from behind, a jade sphinx with Medusa's hairdo. "From you."
Eurydice's appearance woke the lavender girl out of her horny reverie. "Jesus Christ, it's a lime, get in the car!" The lavender girl vaulted over the Jeep's hood, one cheek of her perfect ass squeaking on the silver metal, planting herself between Eurydice and the amber woman, arms upraised like a traffic cop's. "Get the fuck back into the fucking car, CeeCee," she hissed to the amber girl before turning to Eurydice. "Look, limey, we didn't come here looking for a catfight."
Ursula pushed the passenger seat forward. She nodded to Yves and clambered out of the Jeep. Yves hopped out the driver's side door, putting the car in park but leaving the engine running.
"We figured you weren't gunning for a fight when little Miss midnighter here tried to save my life," Dee said, patting the obsidian girl on her featureless pate. She snuggled in even closer. "Now how do I get her off?" Eurydice flashed him a leonine glare and he mutterred, "Um, wow, that didn't come out right…"
"Quiet, you," Eurydice huffed. She pawed a hole Dee left in the pavement and turned back to the lavender girl. "So, whose side are you on then?"
"Ours," said the amber woman, CeeCee.
"Not hers," the lavender girl added sourly.
The obsidian girl snuggled.
"I'm confused," Ursula said, maneuvering around CeeCee, the amber woman with the curves of pin-up girl from the Forties but the girth of a professional football linebacker. The obsidian girl peeled her head away from Dee's chest and pivoted her shoulders in Ursula's direction. Ursula looked into the obsidian girl's blank face and saw only her own convex reflection gazing back at her, as if the obsidian girl had put on an Ursula mask. "I'm confused," she repeated, unsettled. "'Her' who? I'm having pronoun trouble."
Yves answered her. "Cherry Cupcake." He worked his knife into a pouch below the armpit of his undershirt. "She made you?"
"Black Cherry made her," CeeCee said, gesturing to the obsidian girl.
The lavender girl reached back to wrap a protective arm around CeeCee. It sank into the rich batter of CeeCee's shoulders. "The psycho-twat had us made. Oops, shit, I'm stuck in you again."
"What can I say, honey," CeeCee cooed as the currents of velvet-soft flesh dragged the lavender girl closer and deeper into CeeCee's side, "we go together well."
The obsidian girl stepped down and away from Dee. She still wore Ursula's face but did not say a word. Not counting the wings, Ursula thought, she's no taller than me. Why is she staring at me? Wait, that's just my reflection, which means I'm the one starting at her. Oh, great, now I can see myself blushing.
Yves' sidled in front of the Jeep, never turning his back to the group of goo girls. "I don't understand."
The lavender girl's arm sucked into CeeCee's side until the two goo girls stood shoulder to shoulder. "Your tits are even softer on the inside," the lavender girl told CeeCee. "What does this feel like?" The lavender girl rolled her shoulder, tongue peeking out between her teeth. She gave a little yelp and squished into CeeCee's side, head-to-toe.
The obsidian girl skipped forward. Ursula backpedaled, keeping a few paces away. The obsidian girl flourished a wing, and Ursula could not help but follow its tip with her eyes as it traced over trim, inky black flesh, the long line of a willowy neck to narrow shoulders to budding breasts to a flat and firm tummy to--Snap! Snap! The obsidian girl's fingers snapped together, loud as pistol shots. Ursula dragged her eyes back up into the obsidian girl's face, the Ursula-mask face.
Licks of sunny yellow crawled over lavender hips. "It feels so good," CeeCee said, "you'd better pull out or you're coming in."
"All the way?" the lavender girl asked, watching a creamy tendril swirl between her breasts.
"Mm-hm."
"Again?"
"Mm-hm."
"Hm," the lavender girl hummed. She glanced at their audience. Yves, Dee, and Eurydice seemed struck dumb by the display of the golden web spinning across her body, coiling around her nipples and vanishing into the cleft of her sex. "What about—ooh!—saving the world?"
The obsidian girl inched forward. Ursula's blush deepened but she stood her ground. A gentle wave rippled up from the obsidian girl's neck and her face dusked into a matte black. The Ursula-mask vanished. Yes, Ursula thought as the obsidian girl's wings excited the air, I'm still staring. The obsidian girl held a hand out for her. I'm staring at you, not the me-in-you. Ursula tentatively reached for those smooth, conical fingers. I want to touch you, not the me-in-you.
"That was short, dark, and creepy's idea," CeeCee said. "But it looks like she's found something else to think about now."
"Wait." Ursula spun around. "What? Saving the world?" In her peripheral vision, Ursula saw the obsidian girl smack herself in the forehead and stalk away. "The world needs saving?"
"Break it up," Eurydice snarled, "and make with the exposition."
CeeCee and the lavender girl pulled apart, purple-red-gold filaments and filigree unraveling and snapping. Yves looked ready to retch but would not look away as they rewove themselves. "Start from the beginning," he gulped, "and don't do that again."
When the lavender girl's surface tension sealed over her nectarous insides she intoned, "In the beginning." She looked into the Sun. "In the beginning there was this…" She opened her arms to the sky "…There was this biiiig refrigerator."
"What the Hell is this," Yves demanded, "goo girl religion?"
"No," Dee said. "She's being literal. Going back to her first memory. Hey, Yves, you look like crap. You okay?"
"Yeah," Yves puffed, "I will be, yeah. This is just a lot of goo for me, right now. Sorry," he told the lavender girl. "So you were in a refrigerator."
"I was in a bowl in the refrigerator. An aluminum bowl." When Yves did not react to this revelation she soured. "Look, you fucking faggot, you wanted the whole story and I'm giving it to you. You ever bit on a piece of tinfoil? Well, that's what it was like, but my whole body was in that fucking bowl, and my whole body is one big mouth. And it was cold…" She shivered at the memory. "So cold…"
"Honey," CeeCee stage whispered, "you can't call a man a faggot and then expect any sympathy."
The lavender girl waved her off. "Okay, okay. So there I was, in the dark, in the cold, tasting nothing but that fucking aluminum, for like for fucking ever. And then there was light." She glared at Yves, as if daring him to say something. "There was light and air and—whoosh!—these big red hands grab me out by the bowl and flip me upside down and drop me—splat!—right onto this kid's cock. And then, I mean, what would you do? The bowl was so cold and tasted so bad but here was this cock and it was so warm and tasted so good. I thought I'd died and gone to Heaven."
"Whose cock?" Yves asked.
"Dee left me there," Eurydice mumbled.
CeeCee paled sallow. "He left you in the bowl? Oh, you poor thing."
"No," Eurydice said, "worse." She paced on all fours and started to babble. "He took me out of the fridge and he saved me from the bowl and then he took out his dick and it was huge and I could feel the heat pouring off it. And then he held me so close to his cock, so close I could taste, I could almost taste…and then he dropped me on the table and left me there until I melted."
CeeCee and the lavender girl were silent and saucer-eyed. The obsidian girl's wings trembled violently.
Yves breathed, "Jesus Christ."
"I'm sorry," Dee begged.
Ursula stomped over and kicked him in the shin. "You asshole!" It felt like kicking a boulder, but her clunky Doc Martins absorbed most of the resistance.
"I'm sorry." He fell to one knee if front of Eurydice, "Honey, I didn't…"
"It was amazing!" Eurydice crooned.
Dee blinked. "Huh?"
"You teased a lime," CeeCee said, awed.
"Hours and hours," Eurydice gabbled, "and all I could remember was your cock. All I could think about was your cock…"
"You cunt teased a fucking lime," the lavender girl said.
"…What you would taste like," Eurydice was saying, "How you would feel, how warm you would be…and how much I would make you cum, over and over and over. Nothing but you, your cock, your cum, for hours."
Dee looked lost. "Was that a good thing or a bad thing?"
Eurydice sighed. "It was a good bad thing, Dee." She hid her head in her forepaws. "A very, very, very good-bad thing."
Ursula and Yves exchanged looks. "Maybe it's a hetero thing," Ursula hazarded.
Yves shrugged and cleared his throat. "Whose cock?"
"Some guy from a grocery store," CeeCee said. "He must've been with her when she mindfucked all those Easies. And then she tricked him into making us and trussed him up in that kitchen and let us suck and fuck him until he cried. We thought we were just giving him what he wanted, poor dear. He eventually started to scream, and we finally figured things out and left him alone. We thought he was you, you see," she said to Dee.
"No," Dee said, "I really don't. He made you?"
"Yeah," the lavender girl said. "We found Black Cherry and confronted her about it afterward. She convinced him to pick a couple of flavors—Cheesecake, here, and Raspberry, that's me…"
"No shit," Yves said, eyes wide in mock surprise.
"Shove it, spooge mouth." Raspberry flipped him the middle finger. "You fuck cows in retrospect. Where was I? Oh, yeah, she said some bullshit about a curse, how the person who uses the novilunium never gets what they want, so she got him to make us instead."
"Did that work?" Dee asked.
"I told her to eat shit and die," Raspberry crowed. "I'm nobody's minion and I'll never call anyone master."
"We demurred," CeeCee said, "and she scooped us up and threw us in the store room. She's so powerful, Mast—er, Mr. Detwiler, we were too scared to run away. But we heard about the party tonight, and we had to do something, so we snuck onto the roof when you made your surprise inspection."
The obsidian girl rushed over and poked CeeCee in her ample belly. Her finger came away batter free. "Well, we did have to do something," CeeCee insisted. "We, Raz and me, had to skedaddle. Then darkwing here showed up and offered to bust us out in exchange for helping her find you. Find Dee, that is. We didn't expect a...band, or league, or whatever it is you've put together. And we certainly didn't expect another lime. Black Cherry was convinced she had the only one."
"She does." Eurydice stood and morphed into her busty Unabomber disguise again. "I am Galatea, and Galatea is me."
"You can divide? Sweet," Raspberry whistled. "That is so hot. I tried dividing and all I got was me and a puddle of jam that was dumber than a sack of wet shit. I can hawk a mean loogie though."
"Where is she keeping Galatea?" Dee asked in a voice so calm and mild it frightened Ursula to the core.
"We don't know," CeeCee said. "We'd only been alive for a few hours before you showed up, and it's a big house. We did not see her. Can we ask a question, now? Just one, other than these two?"
After a long pause, and in that same mild voice, Dee said, "All right."
"Where the fuck are we going?" asked Raspberry.
"SRU," Yves said as Dee nodded, "the place where everything started. How many men are supposed to show up to the Easies' party tonight, do you know?"
"About fifty eligible bachelors," CeeCee said. "Black Cherry plans to drain, kill, and consume them all."
Raspberry thought this over. "And probably not in that order." She grinned.
"You see what I meant about spoon feeding her straight lines," CeeCee told Ursula.
"We're on a timetable, then." Yves hustled back into the Jeep driver's seat. "Let's get moving."
Ursula groaned at the prospect of another ascent into the Jeep. The two-door vehicle's high wheels and narrow access to the rear cabin were not designed with petite women in mind. She awkwardly swung up and hauled her butt high and vulnerable into the empty space that the Jeep's fallen passenger door once shielded—and a stinging tingle shot through one ass cheek and grounded itself in her clit. She stumble-hopped backward away from the car, chirping a staccato of swearwords: "What-shit-fuck-crap!" She almost tripped over her own clunky boots before she regained her balance, braids flopping. "Dammit, who pinched me?" And who knew exactly where to pinch me?
She whirled to face the assembled mob. Dee wore his inscrutable smile. Eurydice frowned at Raspberry as the lavender girl, unabashed, undressed Dee with her eyes. CeeCee was contemplating the sky but pointing an oozing finger at the obsidian girl. "You," Ursula said. The obsidian girl steepled her fingers against her neck. "Don't give me that 'C’est moi?' look," Ursula seethed, advancing.
"How do you know her 'C'est moi' look?" CeeCee asked as Ursula stormed past.
"How can she have a look when she doesn't have a face?" Raspberry wondered as Ursula drew nose-to-oval with the obsidian girl.
Ursula narrowed her eyes at the Ursula-mask reflected in the midnight gloss of the obsidian girl's head. "Well?"
The obsidian girl danced back, stood still a moment, and then gave a helpless shrug. She wriggled her fingers, hands level with her hips, in febrile, grabby flexions.
"Of course you think I have a great ass," Ursula sneered. "Everyone thinks I have a great ass. In fact, the next…" Ursula faltered. "The next person...the, the next…" She flushed as she remembered. ["…the next person who mentions my ass is going to wear it for a hat, I swear…"] Ursula chewed on a braid. "Uh, never mind. Just…wait." The gloss drained from the obsidian girl's face and the Ursula-mask vanished. "What are you doing?" The obsidian girl's skin grew cloudy. Her wings unfolded into drooping, paper-thin tatters. "What's wrong?" The obsidian skin grayed and the faceless girl collapsed to the ground, swaying on her knees. Ursula pulled back, hands clapped over her mouth. "Oh, God, I'm sorry."
A heavy, uneven weight rolled over Ursula's shoulder. CeeCee was stroking it with her thick fingers. "It's not your fault," she said. "This is her choice. There's something we didn't tell you."
Raspberry knelt beside the fading obsidian girl but hesitated to touch her. "It's fucking amazing she lasted this long, after what she's been through. She's different from us, somehow."
Dee uttered his favorite refrain, "What the Hell is going on?" but Eurydice tapped him on the arm, muttered, "This isn't about you. C'mon," and tugged him away, whispering into his ear.
"She didn't just bust us loose," CeeCee explained. "She fought Black Cherry while we got away. Those two had been at each other's throats ever since she refused to touch the grocery-guy."
"When Black Cherry concentrates on the Easies," Raspberry said, "she can make them do pretty much anything. If our little batgirl hadn't kept Black Cherry busy by opening up a can of whup-ass all over that psycho-twat, this Jeep and everyone in it would be suffocating under a ton of zombie pussy right now." The obsidian girl's legs spread out into uneven puddles of ink and Raspberry added, "Oh, Christ, here she goes. I can't watch."
Ursula's stomach flipped. "I don't understand."
CeeCee shook her head, "She's used most of her novilunium and she's taken nothing to balance the scales. She's losing cohesion.
"She's dying."
Ursula took another shaky step backward. "Are you saying she used the last of her magic—nanomek, novilunium, whatever you want to call it—to grope my ass?"
CeeCee gave Ursula's shoulder a gentle squeeze. "I suspect the prospect of touching your derriere was the one thing that kept her going." CeeCee clucked. "And, honey, that thing is fine."
The obsidian girl lolled her head and shrugged, but Ursula shushed her. "No. Don't move. Every time you move, it costs you more magic. Wait." She knelt on the ground next to Raspberry. The obsidian girl's legs had deliquesced up to her knees. She appeared to be standing thigh-deep in a pool of glistening black ink. "If you can still move, that means you still have some magic left. How much?" The obsidian girl held her finger and her thumb in a shape of L on her forehead, waited for Ursula to crack a nervous smile, and then closed the gap between the two digits until they were about an eighth of an inch apart. Ursula's stomach settled. "Okay, we just need to get you a bucket, or something, and you'll be fine until I get you some…Oh, Jesus."
"Never heard it called that before," CeeCee said. Her arm withdrew but left a residue of buttery yellow cream on Ursula's poncho. "Oops, sorry honey. That's cashmere, isn't it?"
"Doesn't matter," Ursula muttered.
"Whoa." Yves leaned over and poked his head out of the Jeep. "Ursula, you're in deep."
"Fuck you and find me a bucket!" she cried.
"Don't," Raspberry added, "it wouldn't work, not for long."
"Why the fuck not?"
Eurydice tiptoed into the orbit of the conversation. Ursula was surrounded by goo girls, enclosed on all sides by living walls of shimmering, slobbery, sticky glop. The air infused with a miasma of citric and cloying scents. Ursula did not give a damn. "Why the fuck not?" she demanded again.
Eurydice spoke softly. "Brownian motion. The energy has to come from somewhere."
"Oh come on," Yves said, "You are making that up." Three pairs of gemmed eyes—canary diamond, purple amethyst, darkling emerald—burned at him and he fled into the relative safety of the Jeep. "Fine, Brownian motion burns magic, so no bucket."
Didn't Galatea say something about 'burning magic'? Ursula gasped, "I know what to do."
Yves poked his head back out. "What?"
["…When you were wearing me, and I held still while you moved, I didn't burn any magic…"]
She rocked back onto her ass and pulled her knees up. "I know exactly what to do." She pulled at the laces and buckles of her boots.
"What?" Yves groused again, but Dee had circled around to the driver's side of the Jeep and made a furtive zip it, will ya? gesture.
Ursula hitched up her poncho. The obsidian girl bobbed in her tarry pool as the ascending cashmere garment revealed a milky-white abdomen and a lacy black bra. Ursula glanced down at her own curves and then looked around. Raspberry's a viola, Eurydice's a cello, and CeeCee's a full-blown double bass, so I guess that makes me a violin. You're a violin, too, Ms. Whatever-Your-Name-Is. She surveyed the obsidian girl's svelte figure and sighed. No wonder I gave up the cello in high school. I should have known. Ursula pulled her right foot free of its boot before locking eyes with the reflected Ursula-mask. I'm a violinist.
"Wear me," Ursula said, rolling her sock down and tossing it away. Her bare foot hovered over the slowly expanding perimeter of the obsidian girl's liquefying lower body. The inky black pool caught the delicate heel's reflection, a moon trapped at the bottom of a well. The revelatory image hit Ursula with an epiphany, and she could only whisper in benediction.
"Wear me, Nyx."
Nyx shuddered and clawed at the blacktop, disappearing up to her waist into the pool.
Eurydice tugged off her sunglasses. "You named her." She turned. "Dee! Ursula named her."
"It's okay, Nyx," Ursula soothed, "I know this will work." She scooted backward over the pavement to avoid soaking her butt in the advancing, iridescent stain. "But let's start with my toes, alright?" Nyx's eyeless face fixed on Ursula's bare foot. Ursula wiggled her toes at her. "Lesson one: Ursula's toes." Thank you, Galatea, Ursula thought, for talking me through this first, for making sure I was ready. "Ursula's ass will be in lesson two, I promise." Her cheek still stung where Nyx had pinched her. She concentrated on the sensation and her sex ached. And, God, am I ready.
"This is so fucking hot," Raspberry gawked. The orchid petals of her hair dewed and stuck together in unkempt clumps. "I don't know what to say."
CeeCee swaggered back a few steps, giving Ursula a little more personal space. "Keep doing what your doing, honey," CeeCee told her. "Anything that shuts Raz's trap is fine by me."
Yves moved out of the way and Dee called over him through the Jeep. "So?"
"I thought only you could do that," Eurydice said.
Ursula dipped her foot down. "Here we go." The tip of her big toe kissed the surface of the ebon pool. "There. You feel cool and…and dry." She squished the stuff between her toes. "Fluid yet dry." She swallowed. "Slick but not sticky at all." She smiled, hoping she looked demure and in control despite the meltdown in her pants. "I like it." Like it? I love it. I want to jump in and God-damn wallow in it. The surface of the pool shook from Nyx's trembling, and Ursula knew she had to take it slow. "I like it a lot. Now…" And take charge. "…little girl: cover my foot." Black ink lapped over Ursula's toes and crept up her ankle in a slipper softer and smoother than silk. "Tighter." The slipper drew snug. "Tighter."
"So…hot," Raspberry droned.
"Shut…up," CeeCee drawled.
Dee shrugged. "What name?"
Green, glassy beads dripped from Eurydice's chin and rolled off the blades hair poking out from the hoody. "Huh?" The droplets sizzled when they hit the pavement. "Oh. Um. Nyx."
The slipper grew to swallow Ursula's calf. "Tighter, little girl, tighter." The slipper clamped down just below the knee. Ursula felt it grip hard, even between her toes, to become a sleek, flawless, second skin. Ursula rolled up her pant leg and caressed the glassy surface of the obsidian stocking connecting her leg to the ebon pool. "Perfect." Oh, God, I'm actually purring. "Hold it right there for a minute." Ursula squirmed and tugged at her remaining boot. My underwear is sopping. Dee is oblivious, I bet Yves is suspicious, but the meliae are bloodhounds for sex. They must know exactly how I feel. Including Nyx. "Let me take my other boot off and then we can start lesson two." Ursula giggled and leered. "Getting into Ursula's pants."
"Good name," Dee said. "I don't see the problem. What's going on?"
A balled-up sock sailed over Eurydice's shoulder. "Uh. Y'know. Stuff."
Ursula plunked her bare foot into the ebon pool. Nyx needed no further encouragement. Lurid fluid raced over Ursula's ankle and disappeared under the pants cuff. Ursula relaxed recumbent. The creamy flesh peeping from rips in Ursula's distressed jeans vanished into shining black. A cool, silken bath crawled over her knees. She sighed and scissored her legs. The Nyx-stocking clinched and flexed. Ursula mewed. "Sooo…slinky." The delicious sensation stole higher across Ursula's thighs and Nyx's body sunk into the pool of pitch up to her chest. Ursula thought Nyx looked more like an imperiled heroine sinking into a jungle tar pit than a dissolving meliae. Then the tide of fluid velvet poured into her panties, engulfing her ass and sex in a single, siphoning, suckling kiss, and Ursula did not think or see anything at all.
Eurydice's sunglasses melted in her clenched fist. She spun and shuffled around the front of the Jeep, her gummy army boots sticking to the pavement and leaving a trail of smoking green footprints. "Dee." She spoke in hoarse monotone. "Dee let's go."
Dee turned to face his advancing girlfriend. "Huh?"
Jellied dreadlocks tumbled out of Eurydice's hoody and fell over her eyes in a chaotic, steamy mass. "Let's go fuck."
"What?"
Ursula's soft mewling drifted over from the other side of the Jeep. Eurydice grabbed Dee by the elbow and urged him into a copse of scrub trees clustered close to the road. "Let's go fuck now."
"O-okay."
Yves shouted after them, "We've got a time table, remember? Cannibal skank-bots? World in jeopardy? Hello?" He tried another tactic. "Jesus, Dee, I can see your dick…No, that doesn't help, Eurydice, I can see through your ass."
A swash of black gushed out from beneath Ursula's belt to fill the narrow hollow of her belly. She pushed against the road, hips pumping the air, and coils of black lashed over the small of her back. She drifted down from the height of ambush orgasm into a muzzy mind and a world in soft focus. I came so hard it knocked my glasses off. The black bodysuit stretched to taste and tickle her ribs even as more swirled up from the pool, coursing under her knees to swirl between her thighs and the globes of her ass—but something was missing. What was it? Oh, yes. "Tighter."
Raspberry groaned, sat up on her knees, and drove gluey fingers into her pussy. She threw her head back—and did a double take at CeeCee, who was just standing there. "How can you not be whacking off right now?" Raspberry demanded. "Can't you fucking smell it?"
"Don't mistake composure for ease, honey," CeeCee said, "I'm hot enough to sit on a fireplug."
The slinky bodysuit slurped up Ursula's chest, swallowing one rib, sucking against the skin to fill every pore, and then moving onto the next. Ursula sighed and reached between her breasts to unhook her bra. "Won't be needing this for a while." The bra unsnapped and fell away.
Raspberry ground her fingers into her sex with a pulverizing ferocity, but she still had the presence of mind to grit her teeth and quip, "You didn't need it in the first place."
Nyx's molecule-thin pseudopodia slithered over Ursula's breasts. Ursula cried out when the bodysuit vacuumed against the tender flesh. Ursula's nipples hardened under the second skin, each crinkle made to stand out in sharp relief by the glistening coating. A familiar, burning wire stretched down from Ursula's chest stabbed deep beneath her bellybutton. Nyx descended into her contracting pool until only her shoulders breached the surface, covering Ursula in a thickening shell of liquid night. Wanting to look Nyx in the face before that face disappeared, Ursula swiveled her hips in a effort to sit up. The whole bodysuit sloshed and the goth girl was lost in a raging surf of overstimulation from toes to clit to tummy to tits to neck to chin to lips-teeth-ear…
thank – you – named – me – you – saved – me – named – and – saved – me – thank – you – thank – you…
The voice was so quiet, small and quick Ursula could barely distinguish it from the oceanic thrum of her heart in her stoppered ears. Ursula tried to speak, "Ny—" but the black fluid filled Ursula's mouth with the taste of licorice, anise and absinthe. yes – me – Nyx – yes – name – life – thank – you – let – me – thank – you… Panic fluttered in Ursula's stomach as the bodysuit surged thick and fast over her face, sealing her lips and eyes. no – never – hurt – you – never – would – never – oh – let – me – thank – you – let – me – fuck – you…
Licorice ambrosia poured down her throat. Nyx's gel-flesh nuzzled Ursula's clit and vulva. The goth girl spread her legs in mute assent but could not hope to match the cavernous pit of need her sex had become. The swath of bodysuit covering Ursula's cleft concaved, throbbed deep into her core, and set her to flight.
Ursula's inner eye buoyed into the sky. Her body sprawled on the road below. The last vestige of Nyx, a dome of jet black on otherwise faded asphalt, liquefied and flooded up Ursula's kicking legs. The lustrous coating gave Ursula's skin and angular profile the perfection of a masterwork sculpture of flawless black granite. "I wish I had taken off those stupid blue jeans," Ursula sighed. "I bet our legs look fantastic."
"Yeah." Galatea's unmistakable voice rang out from the very air. "Tobey McGuire, eat your fucking heart out."
Ursula's adrenal gland was stuck in the body flopping on the pavement far below her mind's eye, but Ursula still felt an insurgent urge to jump out of her skin. "Gah!" Her point of view spun, taking in the road, the roof of the jeep, Eurydice on all fours and impaling herself onto Dee's cock, and the blazing, mid-morning sun. She was alone in the air. "Galatea?"
"Were you expecting Obi-Wan Kenobi?"
"I wasn't expecting any of this." Ursula's point of view righted. "I can handle the astral-body stuff better now, thanks to your coaching, but how the Hell are you out here with me?"
"Damn," said Galatea's voice. "I thought I'd explained this bit. You said it would be okay. I hope I haven't…" hello – hello – where – did – you – go – ah – there – you – are – hello – hey – um – getting – crowded – got – company? "What the fuck is that?" jesus – ha – it's – a – lime – ha – ha – get – in – the – cranium – ha – ha – ha! Galatea cried out her bewilderment. "What's going on?"
Ursula wrapped herself in blanket of smug silence before speaking. "You're the uninvited guest, Galatea, not her, so you explain yourself first."
"Oh, all right," Galatea grumped. "But I'm running out of nanomek fast. Projecting a thought in here costs a bundle." yes – Ursula – yes – so – strong – your – mind – is – so – strong – your – body – so – sweet – come – back – and – feel – me – fuck – you – please – sweet – strong – please! "I gotta be honest, little sister," Galatea confessed. "You're creeping me out. Anyway, Ursula, I asked you to give me, a newbie me, a message from me, the old me, in case something bad happened to me, the whole-me. That message was me, a kinda mini-me. See?"
"Uh, yeah," Ursula said, her point of view bobbing in a cameraman's nod, "that's the part I didn't understand the first time, either. Sorry."
"When I mindfucked you," Galatea explained, exasperated, "I left a little memory web and a packet of energy, a backup magic battery, in case the shit hit the fan. That memory web is almost gone, now, you know. Just a few thoughts left. Is another Galatea going to show up soon?"
Ursula mused, "A backup magic battery? But you said you recharge your magic by fucking Dee's brains out—Oh my God, you put Dee's sperm in my brain!"
ew – ew – ew – um – no – wait – hold – on – magic – battery?
"Don't be silly." It was Galatea's turn to be smug. "You don't put sperm in your brain, you put it in your—" found – it – found – it – lime – thank – you – found – it – just – enough – keep – me – going – keep – me – fucking… "Hey." Galatea grew faint. "That's not yours."
"Nyx, no," Ursula insisted. "The, uh, power level of that battery must be so small."
Galatea's furious screech echoed as if from miles away. "It's over nine thousand!"
"Okay." Ursula astral-shrugged. "Maybe more than a little. Still, Nyx, don't waste it fucking yourself to death." worth – it – worth – it – worth – it – to – thank – you – to – love – you… Ursula aspired into the air, stunned. "Nyx…"
"It's easy to for people like us to die for love, little sister." Galatea's wistful, distant voice crackled with empathic static. "Ursula wants you to take the harder path."
don't – understand – don't – want – to – stop – want – to – thank – want – to – fuck – want – to – love… Ursula focused on the source of the whispery non-speech. While Galatea's astral voice came from the surrounding air, Nyx's words flittered from somewhere deep within, from between the eyes and beside the heart. "Live for me, Nyx." will – try – will – live – will – love – live – love – oh – love…
Galatea's voice strained even as it broke apart. "It…yours…lit…sister. Ursula…tell…love him. Tell Dee…no matt…happens. I love…always." And Galatea was gone.
so – sad – so – strange – Dee – cute – kind – caring – but – too – solid – almost – stolid – yuck.
Ursula scudded down toward the Jeep, laughing. "I thought all goo girls were into solid boys." Dee – too – hard – CeeCee – too – soft – Ursula – just – right! She drew close to her body, marveling at the mummifying corset of Nyx's embrace. It smoothed out every uneven line or asymmetrical curve, molding her flesh into its ideal shape—not a generic twiggy, Hollywood starlet ideal, but an ideal Ursula shape. Her ebony-glued braids were giant, bendy licorice sticks. Her legs twitched, her gummed lips curling in a rictus of carnal bliss. "Nyx, how am I breathing?" no – need – you – opened – yourself – to – me – and – let – me – flood – within – you – now – you – breathe – the – blood – music. "You mean you're oxygenating my blood?" bah – science – babble – no – mystery – no – romance – come – back – come – sing – the – blood – music – with – me! or – just – cum – that's – fine – too.
Ursula wafted close enough to see the stretchy black membrane covering her tongue and teeth. "I need to breathe to get back in, to inspirit my body." ah – yes – inspiration – yes – mystery – yes. The liquid shadow drained from Ursula's face in fingers of running fluid. Her mouth swallowed its contents down in a sensuous gulp. Ursula heard her own post-orgasmic laughter for the first time—a deep, slow, mind-blown chortling. "Damn," she said, watching her body luxuriate on the ground and feel itself up. "I never imagined myself like this." how? "So…sexy. Hold on, that reminds me of something I can't believe I forgot."
["…That was 'going at it'? But I was just walking…No, you're right, it was more than that. It really did feel like sex. Constant, nonstop sex…"]
The bodysuit peeled away from her head completely, forming a thick band below Ursula's chin, more choker necklace than turtleneck. "Oh, Nyx," Ursula sang, ethereal voice dripping with mischief. "In order for you to wear me, to use my body's motion to conserve your magic, you’re going to have to hold still, to not burn nanomek, and let me move you." understood – that – sounds – strange – but – fun – so? "So, I did it with Galatea once, and she said it was a little…intense."
["…When you were wearing me, and I held still while you moved, I didn't burn any magic…But I could still feel you—taste you, touch you, smell you—and you pulled me and pushed me and stretched me and…and fucked me. There's no better word for it. You were touching every part of me. I had no core, no reserve, no backup, no body, just you, you, you, everywhere. I could feel your tits bounce and you pussy drip and your ass rock and your legs swing, and when you put me into your mouth…"]
A spiky shiver shot through the obsidian substance of the bodysuit. wait – what? constant – um – nonstop – sex? pull –and – pussy – and – tits – and – push – and – legs – and – stretch – and – fuck – every – part?
Ursula bobbed back up a bit. "You can read my flashbacks? I mean, hear my memories?" when – they – make – your – heart – beat – this – fast – and – your – sex – get – this – wet? yes – but – but – constant – nonstop – sex?
Ursula could not wait to get back into her body so she could leer properly. She hovered, poised above her pouting mouth. "Oh, yeah."
but – but – for – how – um – long?
Ursula dipped down. "If I have any say in the matter…" Her body's lips parted. "…I am going to make it last…" She pushed her astral-presence close and an electric thrill shocked through her as she tasted her own lips "…for the rest of our lives."
oh – God – oh – God – oh – my – God…
Ursula threw her head back, gasped, and became inspired.
|
Take me down where the love honey flows, Kiss you nice–nibble your toes. Take me down where the good stuff grows, Love you nice–tickle your nose!
—B-52s, Good Stuff |
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